Friday, 13 January 2017

Five Little Things - Frost in the Garden

At the moment we wake up to a white world every other day. The days it's not frosty it's misty and it feels a bit like living in the middle of a fairy tale. I love the crisp, cleanness of frost how it highlights the skeletal structure of everything.

I took these photos in my pajamas with a very thick sweater and a coat over the top, gloves, a scarf and a hat! Afterwards as I looked through them words began to flow and I found myself writing a short poem full of the details I'd seen. One thing led to another and I found myself contemplating how we too get frozen in life, frozen into habits or frozen in the sense of not being able to let go of things. All this fed into my writing and from the frost in the garden I moved onto loss and the things we cannot let ourselves lose, those things we carry with us wherever we go - loved ones who've passed, very special memories, the vague souvenir of a feeling...

This is just one way the writing process can work for me, from image whether photographic or seen live through very specific detail and description and often only towards the end the emergence of the philosophical or emotional which is what probably made me react in the first place. It's like passing through a series of rooms and seeing what's in each one. And I realise more and more that this journey that I take through writing is also how I make sense of my experience of life and this is probably the most precious gift writing can give me, to better understand myself and my world. This year I plan to travel through these rooms often.

No comments:

About Me

I'm Helen Lucy Goldsmith, mama of three, writer, poet, book maker. And also, homeschooler, sewer, knitter and maker of things. With my family we recently gave up our cramped city life and began again in the country. This blog is a place to record our adventures and write about the people and things I love.